SPIRITUALIST medium Steve Holbrook was accused of being 'an agent of the devil' when he attempted to get in contact with loved ones who had passed away.

Fundamentalist Christians demonstrated outside last Wednesday's session outside Chester's Guildhall - but it didn't stop about 180 people paying £10 a head to attend the psychic evening.

Mr Holbrook, who holds four meetings a year in Chester, used to cut hair for a living and said he had been branded 'the hairdresser from hell'.

He said: 'They think I'm acting with the devil. I always say 'I'll get my horns out later'. I cannot knock them too much. It's their belief, just like I have mine.'

Mr Holbrook, 38, used to run a hairdressing shop in Leeds but is now a full-time spiritualist medium and makes a good living from the meetings, mainly attended by women.

'I act like a telephone exchange, for want of a better word, between this world and the next,' he said.

Mr Holbrook says he heard voices from a young age and thought he was losing his mind.

'I might be in a supermarket or in a café and these voices would be telling me things,' he said.

'I would lean over to get a pizza and accidentally touch someone's hand by accident and there would be a message from her son Michael who had just died. The lady would be in floods of tears.'

Another time he was on a train and could see a little boy on a woman's knee but there was no reflection in the window. At the end of the journey he bumped into the woman by accident, who told him the boy was her adopted son who had just died.

Mr Holbrook, who is married with three children, said: 'A lot of it is tying up loose ends where people have not had a chance to say goodbye.'

To the sceptics, he said: 'You have got to have first-hand information and see people's reaction.'

Pastor David Carson of the Zion Tabernacle Protestant Evangelical Church in Grosvenor Park Road, whose members took part in the demonstration, said: 'Contacting the dead is forbidden. The Bible says it is demonic powers masquerading as the spirits of the departed.

'People are led into error by speaking with demonic powers.'

The pastor said in the worst cases those who took part could become depressed and even commit suicide. david.holmes@cheshirenews.co.uk